The present application concerns noise filling in multichannel audio coding.
Modern frequency-domain speech/audio coding systems such as the Opus/Celt codec of the IETF [1], MPEG-4 (HE-)AAC [2] or, in particular, MPEG-D xHE-AAC (USAC) [3], offer means to code audio frames using either one long transform—a long block—or eight sequential short transforms—short blocks—depending on the temporal stationarity of the signal. In addition, for low-bitrate coding these schemes provide tools to reconstruct frequency coefficients of a channel using pseudorandom noise or lower-frequency coefficients of the same channel. In xHE-AAC, these tools are known as noise filling and spectral band replication, respectively.
However, for very tonal or transient stereophonic input, noise filling and/or spectral band replication alone limit the achievable coding quality at very low bitrates, mostly since too many spectral coefficients of both channels need to be transmitted explicitly.
Thus, it is the object to provide a concept for performing noise filling in multichannel audio coding which provides for a more efficient coding, especially at very low bitrates.